Each year on Jan. 27, the world commemorates the Holocaust implemented by German dictator Adolf Hitler and his Nazi party, who came to power through the electoral process.

Their persecution killed millions of Jews, or they were locked up, and abused during that period around World War II.

Nazi death camp survivor Ivan Lefkovits shared harrowing testimony of his experiences on Jan. 27 in Geneva, Switzerland, to mark Holocaust Remembrance Day with a timeless message for present and future generations:

"Don't be neutral, especially not towards human suffering. Remember that the hottest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis," he said at the UN in Geneva.

The 88-year-old Lefkovits recalled the murder of his father and brother, both victims of Hitler's efforts to wipe out Jews, and noted that many European countries subscribed to his views and supported them materially.

He said Slovakia had paid the Nazi authorities to take away Jewish citizens from his home country to concentration camps, speaking to assembled representatives from UN Member States at the ceremony.

Europe "was already a landscape of atrocities" in the 1920s, he continued. "Antisemitism was not just in Germany; it was in many, many places in Europe, in many places of the countries who are represented here."

And on Holocaust Memorial Day, Anglican pastor and professor Simon Ponsonby exposed the 'Christian' roots of the worst massacre in modern history in an article in Premier Christianity Magazine.

"Knowing that I was a priest, a Jewish graduate scholar at Oxford once told me she grew up believing that if she were to look at a crucifix, she would die," he wrote.

"Where on earth would she get an idea like that? I wondered if it came from a long-forgotten memory programmed in her psyche, passed from generation to generation, reinforced by trauma, that churches are dangerous places for Jews."

He said, "The idea is not as unreasonable as one might first think. For centuries the Church forgot it was birthed in the synagogue. Those who lived under the cross often neglected their roots, passing over the fact that their scriptures, apostolic saints and even their own savior was Jewish.

Ponsonby noted, "For hundreds of years, the Church imposed separations, restrictions, extortions, expulsions, and persecutions on Jews. So-called pogroms often occurred on Christian Holy-days, and such atrocities culminated in the Holocaust."

He said that while the Holocaust was by no means Christian, the shocking truth is it could never have happened without the centuries of Church persecution of the Jews that came before it and theology that demonized Jews.

Going to the origins of the word 'Holocaust' derived from two Greek words meaning 'burnt whole,' he said the term is used (along with the Hebrew Shoah meaning 'catastrophe') to describe the Nazi's murder of 6 million Jews – nearly two-thirds of Europe's total of 9.5 million.

While the Jews were not alone in their suffering, Ponsonby noted that the Nazis also murdered 2,000 Jehovah's Witnesses, 15,000 gay people; 100,000 physically and mentally disabled, plus 200,000 Gypsies and innumerable Poles.

"Nazism was discriminatively evil, but always the particular object of their hatred, the motivating factor for industrializing death, was the despised Jews. Before the death camps were conceived, more than 1 million Jews were murdered by bullets in the Ukraine: in forests away from sight, and in the Ghetto streets in full view," he writes.

- Demonic influence

"How can we comprehend such evil? It seems to defy analysis. But analysis is necessary and reveals a complex matrix of interconnecting factors in early 20th-century Germany that created the perfect storm to host a malevolent spirit. The first three were political and cultural, but the fourth was theological."

Ponsonby says there was "a rising fetish with German identity," displayed in an idealized mythology of Aryan Volkism and a disdain for any element tainting the purity and prowess of the true German "Blut und Boden" (Blood and Soil).

Losing the First World War, the proud martial nation of Germany was humiliated and the Jews were early scapegoats.

Secondly, German anxiety was triggered by the rise in the East of Bolshevism behind the Russian Revolution in 1917, which was perceived as a real political threat and, importantly, also as a Jewish movement.

Thirdly, there was crippling German poverty following the war, which saw the hungry dying in the city streets. Resentment grew at the perceived wealth of the Jews.

Nazism also tapped into the previous 1,800 years of Church theology in order to bolster its antisemitic doctrines.

Ponsonby wrote that every one of the Nuremberg discriminatory laws against the Jews had precedence in earlier church council rulings and actions.

"Of course, none of this really explains why the Nazis undertook systematic murder of European Jews," said Ponsonby.

"Most of these Jews were the antithesis of the rich and powerful industrialist or banker caricatured in Nazi propaganda."

"I believe the real motivating factor in the Holocaust was the demonic. An antisemitic, antichrist spirit took root – stealing, killing, destroying. The targeted object was the people carrying the promises to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who remain the apple of God's eye," said Ponsonby.

- Luther's antisemitism

After years of studying this history, one Church figure stands out as preparing the ground and sowing the seed for Germany's antisemitism: the reformer Martin Luther, says Ponsonby.

He wrote several treaties against the Jews; the worst, but least known, is Vom Schem Hamphoras (1543), or The Ineffable Name, a blasphemous work that mocked the Jewish reverence for Yahweh's sacred name.

In it, Luther claimed that the Jews found the name for God up the backside of a sow – a familiar medieval motif called Judensau, a plaque of which still remains on the wall of his former church in. SS soldiers enjoyed photographing themselves proudly beneath it.

Luther's most infamous and influential work was On the Jews and Their Lies (1543). This is a substantial work of 65,000 words of sustained invective against the Jewish people.

He describes them as: "A defiled bride...an incorrigible whore and an evil slut;" "blood thirsty bloodhounds and murderers of all Christendom;" "stiff-necked, disobedient, prophet-murderers, arrogant, usurers, and filled with every vice."

William Temple, in 1941, as Archbishop of York, stated: "It is easy to see how Luther prepared the way for Hitler." It may not be that simple, but unquestionably the dark anti-Jewish animus in Luther, building on centuries of Church antisemitism, laid a foundation for the Holocaust.

Ponson by says that the distinguished Prof. Diarmaid MacCulloch claimed that On the Jews and Their Lies was the blueprint for Kristallnacht, which occurred on the fateful day of Nov.10, 1938.

The timing was carefully choreographed, as this day was Luther's Public Birthday – a German holiday celebrating German identity.

It turned into a pogrom, named 'crystal night' due to the smashed glass of the 815 Jewish shops that littered the streets.

Jewish-authored literature was burned on bonfires publicly; 181 synagogues were razed to the ground; Jews were attacked and humiliated in the streets, and 30,000 Jewish men were rounded up and sent to concentration camps. And the bill for the clean-up of the operation was demanded from the Jewish community.

The Holocaust decimated the Jews of Europe, and part of that was a satanic attempt to stop the prophetic clock ticking towards Jesus' return and reign, and rout of evil.

Immediately following Kristallnacht, the Bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Thüringia,

"Martin Sasse swooned that Luther couldn't have wished for a more beautiful birthday gift," says Ponsonby.

Two weeks later, he printed 100,000 copies of a collection of Luther's antisemitic quotes, celebrating Luther as "the greatest antisemite of his time, the warner of his people against the Jews."

Luther, the great reformer, the most significant figure in German history, unquestionably put fuel on the Holocaust fires – and many within and without the Church looked to him for moral justification.

- Where was the Church?

"Certainly, some Christians bravely protested or preached against the Nazis – too few, too little, too late. Most were intimidated into silence. Those who spoke up or who helped hide, protect, or get to safety, a few Jewish people were arrested and sent to Dachau and Sachsenhausen concentration camps.

"And tragically, many German Christians supported what was going on – if not wholeheartedly, then by their passivity. Even if, as some claim, they were only vaguely aware of whispers of horror coming from Poland or Belorussia and later names like Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Belsen, they all knew how the Jews in Germany and Austria had been treated for a decade before, in front of their very own eyes."

And then there is this: "Even if they were punished in the most gruesome manner that the streets ran with their blood, that their dead would be counted, not in the hundred thousands, but in the millions...they are the devil's children, damned to Hell..."

Ponsonby says, "The Jewish people have long-scarred memories. They rightly do not pass lightly over centuries of persecution at the hands of Christians. The Church must repent of the atrocities committed by her, in Jesus' name, and of walking on the other side of the road when the Jewish people needed help."